[MAD ANDY]

morning all :D

always been into large TVs and cinema sound, currently have a 32" JVC and Panasonic 5 disc DVD with 5.1 and a friend mentioned a colleague of his had just bought an ex-rental Sanyo XW-15 for £350, so got myself one too :D

hopefully the lamp is not about to run out at any point soon as apart from finding them for £100 in the US, they are £250 - £400 everywhere else I look

anyway, a bit of advice needed. I see a few people are using black out roller blinds as screens which seems a good idea, but is a proper screen worth the extra money? if so why? is it the material and light reflecting properties or something?

Also any tips as to the best digital phono lead available for picture quality?

cheers

[Gary Lightfoot]

Blackout cloth is very similar to proper screen material of the same gain - around unity. Unless the image your projecting is very large, say greater than 8ft wide, then you shouldn't need anything more than that.

Try to sit two times screen width away or more so that you can't see the pixel grid pattern.

Specs can be found here:

http://www.projectorcentral.com/Sanyo-PLC-XW15.htm

For fun, try playing a DVD from your pc to the projector using the vga. If you have a Radeon card and something like PowerDVD XP, you'll find you'll get a far better picture than from an ordinary dvd player, as the projector probably doesn't have a very good internal scaler. If you don't mind tweaking computers, read up the HCPC section and find out more.

As for cables, provided it's a half decent 75ohm cable, you don't need to spend loads of money on them. I did an experiment with component cables ranging from £5 to £35 and didn't see any difference. It's possible that cables costing considerably more than that *may* show a difference, but I wouldn't think it worth the outlay. A top bod from Arcam suggested the very same thing, so don't just take my word for it.

Gary.

[MAD ANDY]

Well me and 2 friends ended up buying one of these each:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...category=22610

quite cheap and I read on here that having a black border made the picture more defined so hopefully as soon as I can get round to installing some hooks into a joist on the ceiling (any tips?) then I can get it up and running :D

Was also looking at Gary's website (above) and noticed his DIY mk1 ceiling mount which I like the idea of a quick release option, and noticed these speaker mounts in argos which have more movement than the one's Gary tried so may pick these up in the silver option, spray the part to be left on the ceiling white so that it blends in more when pj is removed, then somehow try and guess where the joist is and fit it as I'm assuming the plasterboard on the ceiling itself is not strong enough to hold the weight of the projector?

http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/st...roductId=60232

mad andy
can u let us know if the screens are any good. price is right

[thfccambs]

Mad andy where did you buy the projector from?